DEVELOPING A THEORETICAL ASSESSMENT METHOD FOR AN ASSISTED DIRECT GEOREFERENCING APPROACH TO IMPROVE ACCURACY WHEN MAPPING OVER WATER: THE CONCEPT, POTENTIAL AND LIMITATIONS

Abstract. Drones offer a a unique survey platform that can operate below cloud cover and acquire very high spatial resolution datasets in near real-time. Studies have demonstrated that drones can be used for mapping over water using the Direct Georeferencing approach. However, this method is typically only feasible with high-end drones equipped with highly accurate GNSS/IMU systems. Moreover, placing targets over water to improve accuracy in post-processing can be challenging, further exacerbating this limitation. In this study, we developed an Assisted Direct Georeferencing method which combines the advantages of traditional Bundle Adjustment (BA) and Direct Georeferencing to overcome these challenges. Our approach utilizes BA over feature-rich segments of the drone trajectory, such as the shoreline, and DG in featureless areas, such as over water. To simulate a water-type environment or surface for our early tests, synthetic datasets have been created using Python for theoretical analysis. We then conducted a theoretical assessment of our approach under low and high variability attitude measurements. Our findings revealed that our methodology performs well under low variability attitude measurements, where wind conditions are close to optimal with an R-square value of 0.93. However, our model performs poorly under high variability attitude measurements, with an R-square value of only 0.028. These results suggest that Assisted Direct Georeferencing can serve as an alternative to high-end drones and Direct Georeferencing for water mapping applications in most standard. The findings from this theoretical assessment provide valuable insights into the achievable accuracy, error budgets, and limitations of the proposed model.